• "There are years that ask questions and years that answer."

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

• "So much of any year is flammable,/ lists of vegetables, partial poems./ Orange swirling flame of days,/ so little is a stone."

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year”

• "Every idea I have is nostalgia."

Mary Szybist, from “The Troubadours Etc.” Incarnadine: Poems

• "Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future."

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and ...

• "From very far or very close—/ the most resolute folds of the mountain are gentle."

Jane Hirshfield, Sentencings

• "Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind."

Henry James, “Letter to Willie James,” 1902

• "Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through ...

• The Sciences Sing a Lullaby, Albert Goldbarth
• Somewhere in the Looming Fear, Anne Cecelia Holmes
• The Last Toast, Anna Akhmatova
• The Glass Essay, Anne Carson
• Human the Death Dance, Buddy Wakefield
• In Landscape, Buddy Wakefield
• Bluebird, Charles Bukowski
• Everything Is Waiting For You, David Whyte
• The Third Dimension, Denise Levertov
• in time of daffodils, E.E. Cummings
• Let It Go, E.E. Cummings
• somewhere I have never travelled,gladly beyond, E. E. Cummings
• You are tired (I think), E.E. Cummings
• Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop
• One need not be a chamber to be haunted, Emily Dickinson

• "Why does tragedy exist?/ Because you are full of rage./ Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief."

Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

• "She knew herself by heart too, and was sick of the old story."

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

• "Stop thinking… The more you think, the faster you cut your own throat. What is there to think about? It always ends up the same way. In your mind there is a bolted door. You have to work hard not to go near that door. Parties, lovers, career, charity, babies, who cares what it is, so long as you avoid the door. There are times, when I am on my own, fixing a drink, walking upstairs, when I see the door waiting for me. I have to stop myself pulli...

• "I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home."

Mahmoud Darwish, from “I Belong There”, translated by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché

• "Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease."

Naguib Mahfouz

• "Both. I want to stay. I want to leave. I am three oceans away from my soul."

Nayyirah Waheed

• "We must take the feeling of being at home into exile/ We must be rooted in the absence of a place."

Simone Weil, Decreation

• "I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have been dragged through I don’t know how many consciences."

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Wall

• "Being. Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it is left legible."

Martin Heidegger, in a letter to Ernst Junger, 1956

• "I speak rain,/ I spin you a night and you hide in it."

Margaret Atwood, from Selected Poems: 1965-1975

• "And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language."

Hanif Kureishi, from Intimacy

• "I needed to touch you/ with a hand, a bo...

• "The French say that to part is to die a little. To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity. When I met Burmese migrant workers and refugees during my recent visit to Thailand, many cried out: ‘Don’t forget us!’ They meant: ‘Don’t forget our plight. Don’t forget to do what you can to help us. Don’t forget we also belong to your world.’"

Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Lecture 2012

• "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"

Jonas Salk

• "You have a tendency to firmly attach yourself to anything older and female, collecting mothers in a way."

Marya Hornbacher, Wasted

• "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."

Friedrich Nietzsche

• "There is always something left to love."

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

• "Deep rivers run quiet."

Haruki Murakami

• "My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

• "I am rooted, but I flow."

• "Endurance comes only from enduring. / With a flick of the wrist I fashioned an invisible rope, / And climbed it and it held me."

Czeslaw Milosz, from New and Collected Poems (1931-2001); “The Magic Mountain”

• "Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer."

Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

• "Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know/ what despair is; then/ winter should have meaning for you."

from Snowdrops, by Louise Glück

• "And the little prince broke into a lovely peal of laughter, which irritated me very much. I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

• "But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?"

Mark Twain

• "We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."

Charles Bukowski

• "Beautiful sadness is a myth. Sadness tur...

• "Tell me where you are./ Turns and returns. I can’t stand it."

Antonio Machado, from “Advices, Verses, Notes,” Border of a Dream: Selected Poems, transl. by Willis Barnstone (Copper Canyon Press, 2003)

• "Between what is said and not meant/ And what is meant and not said/ Most of love is lost."

Khalil Gibran

• “Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.”

Salman Rushdie

• "The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the English it was “the gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten,...

• "I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other. The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love."

Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

• "Love is not consolation, it is light."

Simone Weil, from “Detachment,” Gravity and Grace

• “Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

• "Often when I imagine you/ your wholeness...

• "Identity is an ever-unfinished conversation."

Stuart Hall

• "If you want to kill yourself, kill what you don’t like. I had an old self that I killed. You can kill yourself too, but that doesn’t mean you got to stop living."

Vargus, Archie’s Final Project

• "We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."

T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party